Will Democrats Better Face Donald Trump Or Ron DeSantis in 2024?

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Democrats would prefer the Republican nomination to go to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has yet to announce that he will run for president in 2024 — despite polls showing that he is currently better positioned than former President Donald Trump to defeat President Biden.

Rachel Mummy for The Washington Post via Getty Images

Who will Democrats prefer as the GOP presidential nominee in 2024 — Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis?

Yes, I know Democratic voters won’t have much of a say in this, and they won’t make Republican voters vote a certain way either. And it’s too early to speculate about who will win the Republican presidential primary, let alone the general election — DeSantis isn’t officially in the race yet! — but as we wrote before, early polls should not be put aside.

Late last year, a series of polls from The Economist/YouGov asked Americans who they wanted to be the Republican nominee in 2024, and among Democrats, DeSantis had the edge over Trump — especially that when respondents were given only those two candidates to choose from. When it comes to the broader electorate, FiveThirtyEight’s polling average of each man’s imperfect, hypothetical, head-to-head matchup against President Biden, meanwhile, shows DeSantis has a slightly better chance than Trump.

So what gives? Do Democrats want their own party to face a tougher fight next year?

Democrats’ slight preference for DeSantis over Trump — even though DeSantis is currently better positioned to beat Biden — may be about one simple thing: Democrats really don’t want to deal with the former president again and may not thinking in the present. terms who will lose more.

“I think most Democrats would fear another Trump presidency, but I also think most Democrats would not be happy about a DeSantis presidency and might think that DeSantis is like Trump but ‘more capable. ‘ or something,” said Hans Noel, a professor of government at Georgetown University. “I don’t know if that’s the correct interpretation, but it certainly has a lot of Democrats.”

Of course, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the Democrats’ preferred challenger based on surveys conducted a few months ago. And let’s remember — this isn’t about Democrats liking DeSantis more, or even knowing more about him. A more recent YouGov survey, from late February, showed that Democrats have slightly more favorable (28 percent) and unfavorable (67 percent) opinions of Trump than DeSantis (25 percent favorable, 60 percent unfavorable), suggesting that many Democrats simply haven’t made up their minds about the Florida governor. In fact, 15 percent of Democrats had no opinion of DeSantis in the poll, while only 4 percent had no opinion of Trump. We see similar numbers in other polls as well. It’s possible, then, that Democrats’ preferences are squishy at this point and will continue to shift as they learn more about DeSantis after his expected presidential campaign officially begins.

But when it comes to a head-to-head matchup between the two Republicans, it’s not hard to see why Democrats might have a slight preference for DeSantis to be the GOP nominee, especially at this early stage in the 2024 campaign.

First of all, it’s possible that Democrats are unaware of his (current) heavy-handedness against Biden, and they think DeSantis is more beatable than Trump, who blew them away in 2016 by pulling off the “impossible” win. Further, Noel told me that DeSantis could be seen as a relatively welcome alternative to Trump, especially among voters who are convinced that the former president is “uniquely anti-democratic or a unique threat to American democracy.” Unlike Trump, DeSantis doesn’t have the baggage of a January 6, 2021, Capitol riot or multiple investigations awaiting him.

In other words, if Democrats really like DeSantis at this stage, it may have more to do with their dislike of Trump than DeSantis’ special appeal. And as DeSantis gets more national attention, and especially if he acts like Trump during the primaries (as I predicted he would), Democrats could turn sour on him quickly.

“DeSantis is more than a mainstream politician. So you might not expect him to undermine standards and encourage violence. But we’ll have to see how things play out as we learn more and more about him,” said Noel to me. “To win the primary, he’s going to have to get past Trump on some of these culture-war issues that the MAGA constituency wants. But as he makes appeals to those voters, he’s more likely to alienate he the Democrats in the process.”

The question is whether Democrats will change their minds as the primary goes on, especially if they see Trump as a weaker candidate in the general election (although he was perceived to be the same in 2016, and we all know what happened then). There are many reasons to think that might be the case: Trump-led Republicans have now suffered three bad elections in a row. In 2018, they disappeared from the House. In 2020, they lost the presidency and Senate. And in 2022, while they won the House by a small margin, they otherwise failed to make the gains we expect of the opposition party in a midterm year.

A growing number of Republicans have pointed the finger at him for their party’s failures in last year’s midterms, in which Trump-backed candidates were defeated across the country — all while DeSantis cruised to re-election. , flipping a historically Democratic county along the way. In fact, there are now many reasons to believe that DeSantis or another Republican contender will be a tougher challenge for Biden than for Trump.

It’s also possible that Democrats simply don’t want a redux of the 2020 election. In three The Economist/YouGov surveys from last year, less than half of Democrats said they want Biden to run for president again in 2024, even though the recent polls indicate they think their party has a better chance of keeping the White House if he is the nominee. This is consistent with other reporting and surveys suggesting that while Democrats appear ready to move on from Biden, there is no consensus on who they want to run in his place. But that complicates the lens through which we must examine Democrats’ perceived early preference for DeSantis over Trump as their party’s running mate. For example, Democrats who want Biden to be their party’s nominee in 2024 may prefer a different opponent than Democrats who want someone other than Biden to run.

And of course, the Republican primary isn’t just between Trump and DeSantis. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and ambassador to the United Nations, is already in the race. But in at least two The Economist/YouGov surveys that gave respondents more choices than Trump and DeSantis (including Haley, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Vice President Mike Pence, among others), no Republican candidate gets more than 15 percent support among Democrats. In fact, a majority of Democrats in both polls (38 percent) said they weren’t sure.

It means that public opinion on this matter is not solid. As more Republicans enter the race, Democrats’ opinions of their preferred opponent will undoubtedly evolve. But for now, at least, it seems Democrats just want to keep the former president in the rearview mirror.

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